netherp - share your naughty bits!

At Josh's request, I threw the source code to netherp v2 up on a public Github repository. Here is the URL:

http://github.com/kerrmudgeon/kerrutils/blob/master/netherp

netherp was originally intended to be a minimal-configuration HTTP server for sharing files among two machines of arbitrary make and model. One day a few weeks ago I became enthusiastic about asynchronous I/O and non-threaded server architectures, so I wrote a second version from scratch. It doesn't support HTTP PUT or POST or any method other than GET. There is no authentication, and I suspect there may be ways of compromising it.

Nevertheless, there it is. It's single-threaded, platform-independent [within reason], and relatively fast. On my quad-core 64-bit Linux platform in the lab, I ran http_load requesting a variety of files from my local GPU Ocelot repository ranging in size from a 1kB to 100s of kBs. It handled http_load's maximum of 1,000 requests per second without trouble; in this case, the network was the bottleneck. It has also served a 400 MB file over a residential cable connection, this time running on a Windows machine.

So, it's vetted. It works.

There are several barbaric components that ought to be hastily buried underneath a pile of complexity theory [i.e. the MIME type selector], but this does demonstrate working use of select() which lends some much-needed pedagogical value to this exercise.

Additional comments are certainly welcome.

One other facet of interest is I wanted this to be distributable as source, so I wrote a program to embed binary image files used as logos and icons into the source code of the application. It expresses a binary file as a C++ style array declaration. i.e.:

// 'images/file.png'
const unsigned int image_file[] = {
0x474e5089, 0xa1a0a0d, 0xd000000, 0x52444849,
0x30000000, 0x28000000, 0x608, 0x7987b800,
...
};

May not be the best way, but at least it's out the door.